By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
West began her presentation by inviting members of the court to call her if they ever have
questions about the work her office is doing.
West told the court, “I feel like we just work away in our separate offices, and you don’t
see that we do in the courthouses unless we try to reach out and tell you, and so that’s
why I’m here. I not here asking for approval for anything.
“The OLS (Operation Lone Star) budget is separate; my grant is already put in. I’m just
trying to give you guys information. I know you’re getting ready to have to make big
budget decisions, and so I’m trying to provide you some information that you can use
when you’re making those decisions.
“The first thing I wanted to give you; so, my grant goes every two years. So it will start
again in the fall. So far as I know, the asks that we had have been approved. I’ll know for
sure in June, but I don’t have any information right now that my stuff is going to be cut.
As soon as I know those things, I will let you all know.
“The governor’s office is really good about communicating with us, and I do want to
send out some kudos: the Essers and our (county) auditor are so fantastic with their grant
information that I’m told that our items get approved easily because they trust that our
audits are done well and our numbers are good.
“And between those two groups and now we’ve added a little bit of in-house budgeting
on my end; we literally budget down to the dollar, and it’s a big grant, and so Debbie
reconciles things down to the penny, and the auditor’s office does a fantastic job, and so I
do want to send out kudos and know that you guys are known around the state for how
well those grants are done, and I appreciate you all making sure those resources are
available to us.
“So, my grant is big. To be honest, I don’t even have a number, $3 million or $4 million.
It’s for two years. It funds all the people that your all see. So I know you see those
budgets. Sometimes when the budgets come to you, the lists of employees change, and
so, what we do sometimes, is we’ll switch people between the BPU (Border Protection
Unit) grant and general (county) pay, and then you know, too, I have this SB22 that has
some pay. I know that gets very confusing for you guys. Please let me know if you have
questions.
“The reason we do that is usually because of workload, for some reason. So let’s say
somebody needs to work on a case that’s not BPU, but they’re not assigned under BPU,
either because the timing or because they have expertise, we switch them to general,
because my general people can do everything, and the BPU people can only do BPU.
“So, when I say ‘BPU,’ it means the same as OLS. OLS is encompassed in that, but we
also count a bunch of local things that I think might get complicated too, and again,
please call me later for more explanation.
“The processing center (outside the sheriff’s office) that is used and the Briscoe and
Segovia units that house our inmates are OLS, and the state of Texas considers certain
things OLS. For my numbers, I consider BPU cases to be local arrests that have to do with drugs, because we know that’s border-related, and so, that’s the other thing that I
wanted to talk to you about.
“One of the pieces that I’m trying to convey to the state and my BPU people are assisting
with this is that the spillover of the border situation and the way things roll out at the
border affects our border communities in big ways, other than human smuggling.
“So my BPU grant, in a nutshell, does cover human smuggling, but it also covers a lot of
drug cases, and those are the Val Verde focus.
“So real quick, I just wanted to tell you guys the last report was the sixth report out of
eight, and that one went in in March, and we had received in the past year-and-a-half
cycle, 4,237 arrests to deal with, and we have prosecuted 7,915.
“And I know that sounds strange, right, how can you prosecute more than what you get?
But that’s old cases that we’re still working through, and so that’s the next level of what
I’m going to be talking to the state about, is that they’re funding us, and again, if they
continue funding us, it’s not going to be because of what’s coming in right now, because
it’s relatively slow, compared to what OLS has been.
“I can see winding it down to some extent, but we still have, literally, thousands of cases
to get through and work through, and the 63 rd and the 83 rd courts are both dealing with
those cases as best they can. The 63 rd in Kinney is the vast majority of those numbers.
“So those numbers are not Val Verde numbers, those are my BPU, which is Kinney, Val
Verde and Terrell. And Terrell has some, but negligible. The vast majority of those are
Kinney.
“So we’re working through old stuff. The things that I feel this really affects you all in a
big, big, big way is that my district is the same as Judge Andrade’s district, and here is
the county seat for that district, Kinney, Val Verde and Terrell.
“And you all know, that’s how the grant flows as well. Your OLS grant is only for Val
Verde, but you all know that your OLS grant helps the entire district in a big way, and we
do appreciate that.
“So the next wave of what’s going to hit you guys, you’ve seen it already and I’m sure
you’re getting it in your budget requests is probation. So those 7,915 people, not all of
them went on probation, but at least 6,000 of them are convictions, and so that means a
lot of probationers.
“We do send a number of people to prison as well, but that’s a lot of burden on the
probation department, and it’s not my job to pitch for them, but I do know they’re going
to be telling you guys what they’re facing with those. I’m hoping the state helps fund
some of those things.
“My numbers do not even encompass MTRs, which are motions to revoke (probation).
So the way OLS is – and you guys are probably aware of this – for the OLS waves, where
there were people on the highways getting picked up for drugs and guns and smuggling,
the cast majority of those people were from out of our county.
“They were coming from all over Texas, and to be honest, from all over the U.S. and
some foreign countries as well. So those probationers are all over Texas and all over the
U.S., and so probation has had to adjust how they deal with those out-of-county
probationers.
“But when we revoke them, when they’re not successful, we have to revoke them here, so
those numbers still come back on our numbers, so what I’m going to be asking for this
summer is for the state to recognize in our grant counts that the motions to revoke are going to be big, and how we address those in the funding that they give us, so I’m telling
you guys that so when you’re doing your OLS and you’re going to Washington and to
Austin and you’re talking to people about what you need, those are sort of the incidental,
and I don’t even want to say incidental, they’re the results of what we do, and that falls
on you guys and Kinney County to figure those out, so MTRs are going to be big.
“I’m sure Reggie could give you some numbers. I would be certain to say that we file
more motions to revoke right now than our new cases with OLS coming in.
“And so, if you’re comparing that to these old numbers, these thousands of numbers and
you’re saying, okay we’re filing all those MTRs, that’s what I predict the next wave to
be.
“The state of Texas, from what I’ve seen has been able to adjust to our needs and address
some of those things. I think we just have to be able to tell them why we need it and what
we need and show them that we use it.
“So, one of the fantastic things we’ve done with our grants is, we’ve used it, and I want to
throw out some more kudos: we spend a lot of money in that grant on personnel, but
there’s a lot of other things we purchase with that grant to make things flow, and your
purchasing department has had to adjust to spending those things and if you ask them,
they’ll say Ms. West never wants things someday. She always wants it right away. And
they’re fantastic. We can’t always control our deadlines, and so they’ve done that.
“So I’m anticipating lots of MTRs coming, lots of probation needs coming.
“The other thing I wanted to talk to you guys about is, you’re aware of the CJIS
(Criminal Justice Information Services) numbers. I’ve sent you guys emails about those
in the past. (CJIS) tracks the closures of our cases. And so, when an arrest is made, a
statistic goes into the CJIS system. And those are the systems that track, if we have 90
percent dispositions in a rolling, five-year period, we maintain the ability to keep all our
grants, and that’s BPU, that’s OLS, that’s Stonegarden, that’s every grant in our county
that is funded through those criminal justice department at the governor’s office, so those
numbers are really big, very important to everybody.
“And we have people in Val Verde County that help us track those. My office tracks
those a lot. We pay a lot of attention to that. We’re fine on those numbers, so I’m not
bringing those up. But those numbers to me are helpful for you all to know about because
they show the progression of just Val Verde County, so what I’m going to talk to you
about now is only Val Verde County and is not BPU.
“But I think it’s a spillover of a lot of OLS issues, so 2018, there were about 1,100 arrests
in Val Verde County; 2019, there were about 1,200; 2020, those numbers went way
down, because that was COVID time; 2021, 1,700; 2022, almost 1,800; 2023, 2,000.
“And so what I’m telling you all with those is that those arrests are continuing to go up
and a lot of that is the spillover from the border. What I see in my office, I know you
guys read a lot about online, is the human trafficking piece.
“We don’t have a whole lot of human trafficking cases that we file here because they’re
trafficking them to the big cities, so the people who are being trafficked are the
smugglees, right? And they don’t stay here, so those charges get filed elsewhere,” West
said.
Commissioner Pct. 4 Gustavo “Gus” Flores asked about the CJIS numbers for 2024.
West replied, “2024, I did not pull those because CJIS doesn’t track that yet. You have a
year-and-a-half to end it, so 2024 is too new for CJIS, but I can tell you 2024 OLS is
way, way, way down, and 2024, Val Verde smugglings was more than expected, so we
do have a few hundred out there, and that’s not small for Val Verde cases. It’s small
(compared) to what Kinney has had in the past, but when I throw out these numbers that
are thousands of cases, especially the ones on the BPUs, when I say we received 4,000
cases in two years, those are the size of numbers that the offices in the big cities use, not
like the Bexar Counties, but more like San Marcos, 200,000 people in those cities.
“That’s why the state recognizes the help that we need and that’s why our processing
center is here, because that’s where those numbers were coming from, and they knew
right away we didn’t have the internal resources for that.
“So the other thing that I wanted to point out to you guys about these numbers that is
concerning to me is that the cartels are business people, and so, as we’re hitting the
smuggling hard, when we did all the smuggling pickups on the roads, I cannot think of
one single time that we had what we would call a load of drugs and a load of people in
the same vehicle. So there’s often that we found drugs in the vehicle, but it was usually
user amounts, a small-time local drug dealer who’s carrying his drugs while he’s carrying
people.
“We did not see cartel-sized loads, and what that’s telling me is that (drug) loads are
going in one batch and people are going in another. So as we’re getting more effective at
handling the people issue, the drugs grow, because that’s where the money is right now,
and that is what we see in these numbers.
“So you hear on TV about fentanyl, I think we’ve seen one fentanyl test that’s come up
positive. You see the pills that other communities are having? I’ve seen none of those.
But we have a lot of meth in this community and meth does come from Mexico.
“And so, one of the things that skews the stats sometimes too, is if we test a drug because
the officer says I think this is meth and you send it to the lab, they don’t test it for
fentanyl. There might be liquid fentanyl in there, we just test it for meth because we have
probable cause to think it’s meth and any first-degree level felony drug, they don’t test
for anything else because it’s extra, wasted test. It’s meth, and we’re good, so there may
be more fentanyl than what I’ve seen, but I’m not really concerned about fentanyl in our
community right now, but I’m absolutely concerned about the meth.
“The other thing that I wanted to point out with these numbers that’s a little scary is that I
know I’ve looked back through after the COVID times because meth is more prevalent
now than it used to be, the vast majority of these cases are felonies, and what you usually
see in a small town is that if you have 2,000 cases, you would expect to see 1,500
misdemeanors because you’d see some kids with weed and you’d see some DWIs and
some family violence, but if we pulled these numbers, and I don’t have the exact pieces,
but it’s meth that skews the numbers to more felonies than misdemeanors because your
misdemeanors here are your family violence cases, and your DWIs and you have a
normal number of those, but the drugs are hardly ever misdemeanor drugs.
“The other piece I want you all to be aware of is THC is in our community. We’ve been
doing some presentations around town about the wax and stuff, so we’re addressing that.
We’re working with some groups to work on those, but there’s not the level of ‘low-
level’ drugs that there used to be. So back in my day, when we were kids, people smoked
weed and some people didn’t think it was that big of a deal.
“I don’t remember the last marijuana case I had, and for it to be a felony, it would have to
be a lot. I can’t think of a single one, but I have a lot of THC, and any amount of THC is
a felony.
“So if somebody has a vape that’s half-smoked, that’s a felony amount. And so that, I
think skews these numbers, why we have so many felonies versus misdemeanors, and the
THC and the meth are border-related. It’s tougher in the border communities, and so
that’s why the state keeps helping with funding and keeps funding that for us, because
they know that is a concern.
“So I wanted to give you some of those numbers, and I know that those numbers really
do sound depressing, it sounds like ‘oh, my gosh,’ but our community is still the safe
community that it’s always been.
“When you walk around, you don’t see people hanging out on the streets. It is what it has
always been. It’s just that the same people that are doing those crimes, they’re using
drugs that are now felonies instead of misdemeanors, and that’s one of the things we’re
going to work on.
“Our drug probationers struggle a lot because there’s not a lot of resources here for
treatment, and that’s another issue we talked about with the state a bunch. You guys are
well aware of the mental health resources here, and so we struggle with getting them on a
better track.
“So I wanted to put those forward to you. OLS, BPU, very similar, the numbers I’ve
given you are three counties’ worth. The CJIS numbers I’ve given you are just Val
Verde. And the focus there, I would say, is still on the drug issues.
“So it’s different than the BPU, but it’s all encompassed in my office.
“The last thing I wanted to tell you is that as my grant gets approved and we have the big
personnel numbers, I do know there are those carryover things that you guys take on, the
building, the maintenance, the cleaning, the workers’ comp, all of those things, and I
appreciate it, and I’m sure the community appreciates that you take on the things that you
do to keep our community safe,” West said.
Flores asked if the grants received by West’s office are funded by the state, and she
replied that they are.
She added most of the persons who work in her office are paid through the state’s
BPU or SB22 funds.
Commissioner Pct. 1 Kerr Wardlaw noted that the drugs West’s office is dealing with are
“Class 1” drugs, and West said, “Penalty Group 1, and THC is there now, and that used
to not be the problem that it is right now.”
The writer can be reached at delriomagnoliafan@gmail.com .
